I still need to do some more work to prepare the game for distribution on that platform, so the game will be Windows-only for the time being.

Boo

What else…? Oh right, the issue of payment. The exchange of money for goods and services. Gonna Catcha will be available as a pay-what-you-want title with no minimum.

Yay!

Yay!

Yay!

Whoa, it’s being a while since I posted here. I’ve been so busy getting Gonna Catcha ready for release that I haven’t had the time to make posts. Well, I tried but the post got so long that I got bored of writing it.

There was a video I wanted to accompany another post I wanted to write, but I think I’ll just show it here. During the development of the game, I noticed that the attract mode demo would end in one of two outcomes seemingly at random, despite there being only one set of input files and a fixed seed for the random number generator. Eventually, I discovered what determined which outcome would occur, whether controller input was enabled or not.WAT

WUT

HI

LOL

LOL

That was okay.

I did fix a bug that allowed a player to control/interfere with the attract mode demo using a controller, but this glitch didn’t go away. Here’s the kicker: even non-deterministic elements of the game, the ones influenced by the RNG, i.e. the paths the Wandering and Straying spirits take and the random item that appears near the bottom of the maze are also different between the two outcomes, even though the RNG seed was fixed. Oh well, I think I’ll leave it in; it gives the game character.

Gonna Catcha 0.9.2rc is available for download. The “rc” is for “really cool!”. Actually, no, it stands for “release candidate”, meaning it’s ready to go, barring it destroying the world in the next few days somehow. You can find the download link on the game page.

For now, the download is only available on IndieDB because I got tired of Comodo Dragon (Chromium-based) and Internet Explorer (lol) telling me the downloads from my domain (quadolorgames.com) and Dropbox are “dangerous” because they’re new kids on the internet block. Firefox doesn’t seem to care though.

I haven’t had time to prepare a proper blog post to describe the release of v0.9.2rc in detail; I had been going out and getting people to playtest the game. And no, I don’t feel like getting in a debate about whether this post is technically “proper” or not. In any case, I’ll be making another soon, which will include something peculiar I’ve noticed about one part of Gonna Catcha.

While I wait to see if Gonna Catcha will trigger the apocalypse, I’ll be focusing on trying to increase the marketability of the game. In other words, the description pages of this game on this blog and IndieDB are a mess and really need to be updated and cleaned up. That should be fun.

Gonna Catcha has been updated to v.0.7.3. This update added a new maze to the game, allowing me to bump up the round cap to 12. This also had the side effect of unlocking an enemy type that wasn’t in the previous versions (because it didn’t appear until Round 9). NPCs now also gradually speed up after each bonus round after you’ve played through each maze once. Oh, and there are some miscellaneous tweaks and fixed here and there, yadda yadda yadda.

I will be showing off Gonna Catcha in meatspace at Bento Miso on two occasions:

Since I enjoyed looking at and playing all the games that were showcased at the last Bit Bazaar in May, I thought why not participate this time? The Bit Bazaar offered two options: submitting a game as part of the Arcade or getting a table, which requires you to sell something physical as well (e.g., merchandise, Steam keys or preorders printed on something). Since this is my first time showcasing at the Bit Bazaar and I have no ideas for what to sell, I decided to play it safe and go for the Arcade submission. Perhaps I’ll get a table next time. I’ll get you next time , Gadget… next time.

I took a small break from game development to redesign this blog. It might not win any awards, but at least it’s better than the largely default theme I was using for this blog until now.

Also, I have a new mascot/logo for Quadolor Games. If you haven’t noticed it, it’s the rabbit thing in the top left. I’ve nicknamed it “Quadbunny”. I actually like how it turned out, as graphic design isn’t one of my strong points; I just know enough Adobe Illustrator to get by. I’m also surprised that I didn’t just stick with the very first design that came to mind like I usually fear I would do (Quadbunny went through at least eight revisions before reaching this final design).

Quadbunny’s red-yellow-green-blue colour scheme is a throwback to an older unused logo when Quadolor Games was still Quadricolour Games. And the reason Quadbunny is a bunny is because, well, I like bunnies, especially ones with Dutch markings:

My second choice would have been a Hotot rabbit, a.k.a. eyeliner bunny:

* Actual impressions may vary. See newspaper for details. Limit one per customer. No refunds.

I was playing my 3DS and decided to start up Petit Computer again. For those not familiar with it, Petit Computer is a BASIC programming environment for DSiWare that is geared towards making games on your DSi or 3DS. As I was going through the saved programs, I came across the only game I made on it, Debugging. It is also the first game that was branded under “Quadolor Games“. I figured that I would create a page on this blog for it; you can find it here.

Has it been two weeks already? Tracking the Steam Summer Sale and playing around with shaders in GameMaker: Studio can really make you lose track of time.

Sometimes I tweet stuff on Twitter if the aforementioned stuff isn’t substantial enough to be turned in a full blog post. If you haven’t done so already, you can keep track of those tweets on the sidebar on the right side of this blog or follow me on Twitter.

If you have been following on Twitter, then you’ll probably already know that I signed-up for and got into the ROM Game Jam, the first ever game jam to be hosted by the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto on August 9-11. I am part of the same team that was making That Which Binds Us. I say “was” because we’re focusing our efforts on the ROM Game Jam now, so That Which Binds Us has been put on hiatus for now.

Another tweet I made was about shaders. Wait, I already mentioned that above. Anyway, I downloaded some shader scripts from this forum post on the Game Maker Community forums and, just for fun and curiosity, applied them to Gonna Catcha‘s drawing code. Although it wasn’t its main purpose, but the graphics code modifications I had previously done also allows me to apply a shader to the entire screen, but I wanted to do that anyway. Two birds with one stone I guess.

Here are the results of my shader experiment:

Once you’ve regained your composure from watching the trippy and completely unnecessary graphical effects, you may notice something new in the video. The game randomly places rocks in the maze that act as destructible walls. (Rocks?! I thought they were just blobs!) This is to slow the player down and allow the spirits to better disperse throughout the maze. However, the rock impede the spirits as well, making the whole thing kind of pointless. Of course, they’re spirits; so my plan B would just have them, you know, pass through the rocks unimpeded. Preta can stay impeded by rocks, being corporal beings like the players.

One other big change I made to the game that might not be obvious in the video is the player movement code/rules. Previously, the players had free movement; now their movement is restricted to the grid much like the spirits and preta are. I did this to make turning around corners easier for the players. My previous solution had the players snap to a corridor if they were “close enough” to turn into one; it looked a bit weird and was a bit finicky.

Re-writing and messing around with the movement code did produce some amusing bugs in the process, something that hasn’t happened in a while.

(Wow, this post was longer than I thought. And I was worried that I wouldn’t have anything to write about! Harumph!)

In the past two weeks I’ve been mainly doing a little work here, some more over there and a tiny bit all the way over there. The updates are a bit difficult to stitch together into a coherent theme for a post, so I’m just going to list and itemize everything.

Item #1

Implemented the Hungry Ghost enemy into Gonna Catcha:

It’s current behaviour has it wander aimlessly in the maze like the Wandering and Straying Spirits. However, if there is an item in the maze, it will move towards, consume it and then resume wandering and feeling remorse. Also, you might kick yourself for not grabbing the item first. The Hungry Ghosts are harmful to touch at all times; they can be stunned or knocked out for a short period of time, but they cannot be captured, so they remain a permanent fixture in some rounds.

Item #2

Modified some of the rules for Pohena rounds: if Pohena comes into contact with a good spirit, her movement speed will be reduced until she is no longer touching one. They will slow her down enough for evil spirits or preta to catch up with and kill her. Hopefully (or disappointingly for Pohena) this will make good spirits more of an obstacle as evil spirits are for Donum.

Item #3

New music for Gonna Catcha: Bonus Round!

Item #4

Rewrote some of the graphical and garbage-collecting backend code. The new graphics code fixes some minor graphical glitches that occur when upscaling the game window.

This past weekend, my formerly-TOJam team, “Robots Mashing Keyboards”, and I met to discuss our formerly-TOJam project, That Which Binds Us. We officially have started the project and are now writing down everything we need to do to make this game come into fruition. Here is the premise of our game:

“Oh no! I forgot to feed my dog and the store is closing in just five minutes!”In this game, the player must walk their very hungry and impatient dog to the pet store to get some food before it starves. The task is not a simple one as many distractions stand between you and the store.

Once we get more details hammered out, I’ll make a proper info page on the project just like I did with Gonna Catcha.

In other news, I also went to the Toronto Comics Arts Festival (TCAF) on Saturday with my friends, the other members of “Robots Mashing Keyboards”. The event was hosted in multiple locations far apart from one another, so we decided to go to the one nearest to us, Bento Miso. It was hosting the Bit Bazaar on that day, where a whole bunch of indie game devs were showcasing their works with playable demos and selling special copies of their games and other merchandise.

Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetimeby Asteroid Base – a 2-player co-op game were both players operate a spaceship to defeat enemies and rescue planets from invasions. The control consoles for each of the ship’s systems (turrets, shield, thruster and laser) are spread throughout the ship, so the players must navigate through the ship’s corridors and ladders to switch between them.

TBRS [Turn Based Rhythm Shooter]– “Part bullet hell, part music game”, TBRS has the player and enemy try to shoot each other in turns. First, the enemy will attempt shoot the player using various bullet patterns in rhythm, which the player must avoid, and generate a sequence of button presses (L, R or L+R). Next, the player must match that sequence in order to shoot back at the enemy. The player must also move into the proper position so that their shots don’t miss (which varies depending on the weapon used).

Super T.I.M.E. Force by Capybara Games – A run-and-gun game (like Contra) featuring a squad of different playable characters, each with their own unique abilities. Like in Braid, if you die, you must rewind back to a previous time in order to continue playing. Your past attempts will aid you subsequent attempts to progress through the level and you can even save them from death to get lives back.